This chapter turns to the Indian context to demonstrate how insurgent activity is shaped, if not enacted, by forms of solidarity extended to the victims of violence. The first part focuses on three novels, Diti Sen’s Red Skies & Falling Stars, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, and Diptendra Raychaudhuri’s Seeing through the Stones, which demonstrate the pitfalls of cultivating bonds of violence across caste, class, and gender divisions. Whereas Diti Sen’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s novels build on an enchanted solidarity which fails to foresee the ideological pitfalls of the Maoist movement, Diptendra Raychaudhury’s novel extends a disenchanted solidarity for the militants, one that is geared toward exposing the fractures, fault lines, and inherent disunity of the insurgency. In the second section, two works of literary journalism, namely, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun, steer the discussion on “deep” and “liberal” solidarities that fortify such fractured cultures of insurgency. While Roy’s narrative, given its penchant for fictional devices, is orientated toward a deep, affective solidarity, Chakravarti’s work, which is more attuned to factualization of narrative, is a champion of liberal solidarity.

This chapter examines three novels: Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango, Lucy Cruickshanks’s The Road to Rangoon, and Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma, and two works of life writing: Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear. The fictional works unravel a world of insurgent figures that undergo a constant mitosis and metamorphosis, from lovers to rebels, from fathers to national fathers, and from husbands to dictators. The chapter discusses concepts of intimate violence, affective (in)justice, inherited violence, and intimate sovereignties. Unlike the soft or slow violence of poverty and precarity, intimate violence occurs in familiar sites and spaces, against a familiar enemy. The readings unveil how the intimate violence is bound by sovereign desires of armed secession. The second part pairs two readings, Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear and Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts, offering a contrasting perspective on the interplay of intimacy, affects, violence and sovereign desires. If Suu Kyi’s narrative of defending the nation through militaristic means can be read as an extension of national autobiography then Thwe’s defense of tribal autonomy through affective insurgency can be read as the formative aspect of what I call subalter-nation.

Violence that enters the lives of precarious subjects exists in the form of insurgency, rebellion, and even roguery. The chapter opens with a reading of two texts: Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars, about a real-life journalist with a penchant for literary devices, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, about a fictional journalist with social realist proclivities. By employing literary devices charged with concealed violence, both texts reveal that precarity breeds insurgent violence. Each treats Delta militancy as a metaphor – a symptom of inequalities crystallized into insurgency – and traces other absent metaphors, including naturalized violence, that are laden with militancy: area boys, urban gangs, and precarious ecologies. This is followed by a reading of the “subterranean violence” in Tony Nwaka’s Lords of the Creek: rather than addressing the root cause of insurgency, Nwaka’s novel reveals how the oil fraternity and power elites manufacture a false sense of emergency to crush militants. Thus, the real emergency concealed under the second order of diegesis implodes into insurgent violence. The play of the militant tropes in the three texts is complemented by the “routine violence” in Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, where militancy becomes a response to violent disruption of the daily routines of Delta populations.

From the liberated zones of the adivasis in central India to the oil pirates of the Niger Delta to the successionist fighters of lower Burma and to the Frankenstein rebels of Iraq and Palestine, this chapter brings together various insurgent figures to examine the moral burden of using and abusing violence by nonstate actors in the name of self-defense and self-preservation. Drawing from the theoretical work of Eric Hobsbawm, James Scott, and Eric Wolf on peasantry, banditry, and the moral economy of the peasant, the chapter concludes that between killing and dying, the insurgents do everything to avoid fighting and to eke out a mere livelihood.

This chapter opens with a literary history of armed conflicts in the Global South, and the violent suppression of these conflicts in the name of national security in India, Nigeria, Burma and the Middle East. Situated between the world literature debate and the vernacular turn within Anglophone literary criticism, the chapter develops disruptive (ir)realism as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the multiple modalities of violence in literary texts from the Global South. The chapter traces these modalities to the violent trajectories of insurgent lifeworlds through disruptive plots, mobile narrators, botched syntax, and alternating and collapsing timelines. Such tropes of disruption, the chapter reveals, are inflected in both the aesthetic configuration of insurgent figures who lack a guiding narrative anchor, and the uneven distribution of violence among fictional communities that results in further sociopolitical cleavages. The implied move toward post-terrorism in this chapter gestures toward the social (re)distribution of violence through myriad figures: rogues, rebels, guerillas, bandits, revolutionaries, and, most importantly, insurgents.

Forms of violence and the literary avenues for expressing them constitute allegorical worlds that place them on the fringes of literature. Such worlds submerged under the normative conception of world assert their existence through violent bonds and alliances. Against the predominantly secular and centrist underpinnings in the world literature debate, the chapter construes worlds through malleable, multiple, and contra-normative temporal coordinates. World-making through violence, as Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, Kae Bahar’s Letters from a Kurd, and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad show, unfolds deep within such temporalities where vernacular renditions of divine and organized vengeance have an insurgent mode. Contesting secular notions of the sublime as something to be revealed to the subject at the end of reason, the insurgent sublime manifests as an intrasecular force invoked on a whim at the limit of reason. This intrasecular sublime is salient to Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer and Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins, wherein death and dead bodies become breeding sites of violent alliances. Death in the two novels enables a thanatopolitical resistance where acts of naming, washing, resurrecting, and ennobling the dead lend themselves to a critique of necropolitical technologies that manufacture death as though it were a commodity.

Disfiguring the Terrorist: Tropes, Figures and the Intimacy of Violence

In a post-war story about the intimacy of two amputated legs, an investigative team of inspectors descends upon a battle zone to collect evidence. ‘28 legs in all’, cries out an inspector, ‘19 military personnel and 9 militants’. ‘No, our boss won't accept that’, responds the officer, ‘we can't have odd numbers, we need two legs per person’. Even if we assume that one of the military personnel was an amputee from a previous battle, we still have one militant leg to account for. So, the investigative team either needs to wait until one of the insurgents steps on a mine, or chase some of the local villagers from the militant-controlled areas in the direction of a mine field and hope that they will get an odd number of blasts to even the number of legs. But there will be a problem if one of the military personnel steps on a mine accidentally. That is exactly what happens in Mitali Perkins’ novel Bamboo People (2010), in which a fifteen-year-old foot soldier of the Burmese junta, forcefully recruited, loses his leg in a landmine explosion. Left to die, with a missing leg, he is eventually rescued by another teenager from the enemy's camp, a Karenni insurgent, who takes pity on him and gifts him a prosthetic leg which was meant for the teenage amputees of his own camp.

The boy goes home to Rangoon, proudly displaying his ‘Karenni leg’ (Perkins 2010, 60) to his Burmese friends, in an overt gesture of political bonhomie that allegorically reinforces the notion that Burma the nation needs two legs to trundle along, one organic and one inorganic, one aesthetic and one prosthetic, the Burman and the Karenni, which stand side by side, as it were, but never even on ground or in life. The Burmese teenager can walk only at the expense of a Karenni amputee. The conflict that holds the two legs of the same body together and apart is therefore binding and intimate at the same time, as Moira Fradinger observes in the context of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo: the violence between ‘the most powerless and most powerful [is] part of a structure of enmity whose two polar opposites alternatively embody figures inimical to the fantasized unity of the nation’ (2010, 188).

Rushdie’s autobiographical writing has detailed his early career, his life in hiding during the fatwa after 1989, and his re-emergence into public life since 1998. Joseph Anton requires particular attention not only because of its narrative voice in the third person but also because of its appropriation of both biographical and fictional devices in an attempt to tell ‘as much truth as possible’ about his private self, Salman, who is masked under the public image of Rushdie. Reading Joseph Anton alongside other notable biographical works on Rushdie, namely J. Weatherby’s Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death, Steven Grandison’s The Satanic Verses 30 Years On, and BBC Imagine’s semi-biographical documentary Fatwa: Salman’s Story, this chapter sheds light on the complex interplay of fiction, fact, ‘truth’, and the literary constructions of self, society, and the world in Rushdie’s work.